Episode 34: Learned Helplessness and Working Horses

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Podcasting from a little cabin on a hill. This is the Stacy Westfall podcast. Stacy's goal is simple to teach you to understand why horses do what they do, as well as the action steps for creating clear, confident communication with your horses.

Hi, I'm Stacy Westfall, and I'm here to teach you how to understand, enjoy and successfully train your own horses. In this episode, I'm answering a question that came in through email in response to one of the weekly emails that I send out. If you're not on my email list, it's super easy. You can sign up for that. Over at my web site Stacy Westfall dot com. And the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to read you this one email and it says, Let's say that I convince you that repetition was beneficial for creating rhythm, that horses relax when they can see the pattern of what is coming. So you decide to give it a try. The first thing you're likely to notice is that if you choose to go out and trot 10 circles the size of a round pen, either mounted or during groundwork, is that your horse is likely to start asking a lot of questions when horses ask questions like why? And are you sure they look like break of gate, speeding up, diving in, diving out, reversing directions and lots of other creative things. And I don't blame them for asking. They're simply asking if you are sure. The real problem is that many people are not sure. So they figured they're doing something wrong, somehow being unfair. If your horse willingly trots the 10 circles without asking a lot of questions, you probably don't need this exercise right now.

Congratulations. If your horse asks lots of questions, he probably needs to continue with this exercise until he relaxes. We are not punishing him for asking questions. We are staying on a subject. He has lots of questions about and giving him a chance to find the answers he is seeking. That is the end of the one weekly email that I send out. And here is Mark's question. My riding instructor and I were talking about your quote. Your horse has questions, e-mail, and she believes that 10 or more circles without changing would get boring and would possibly create learned helplessness in the horse. I was thinking that as long as the rider controlled the gate, a little change is permissible. Could you clarify this for us? Thanks. Your emails are very thought provoking. Also, I know it's been a while, but I really enjoyed the video of you riding through the Starbucks drive thru in Norco. I hope to move there myself one day. Thanks for your time. Mark. Mark, thank you for your email and for your thought provoking question to my email. And Norco was amazing if you guys haven't seen the video. It's on YouTube and I'm actually riding my horse through this amazing little town in California where everything is setup for horses to really go through. So even the crosswalks have the button that you poke to be illegal across the street is at riding mounted height.

There's one up there. Super, super neat little town. Definitely worth watching the video. And now to answer your question first, I have to admit that I had to ask Google what learned helplessness was. And what I learned was it is a condition in which a person suffers from a sense of powerlessness arising from a traumatic event or persistent failure to succeed. It is thought to be one of the underlying causes of depression. Now, of course, it was Google, so there were a million different definitions. But what they all had in common were the idea that this was anywhere between a traumatic event or persistent failure. And it was pretty interesting to read one of the traumatic events and one of the early studies. I guess they actually were using rats and electric shocking flaw and they basically shocked them until they had no response. And there was, of course, a trigger around there, something like ringing a bell, shocking them. And, you know, for a while they would like hear the bell and then they would freak out. And then they just stopped freaking out because they had learn that they had a sense of helplessness. They were powerless to escape because they literally were powerless to escape. This is definitely a traumatic event. And a lot of the different, different definitions of it were very traumatic, very abusive type things.

And that's really sad even for the rats. And then the other line, the other side of this, where there's Perth's persistent failure to succeed, that's definitely where it gets much more gray depending on how you want to define that. So that's probably where much more of this conversation is going to be, because for sure, traumatic events and abuse are bad, not good. I wish I could tell you that in the horse industry that that didn't happen. I wish I could tell you that this was a magical industry where humans are involved, but. There's never any of that kind of abuse. But humans are involved. And across the board in life, it doesn't matter whether you go look at sports or whether you look at school systems or whether you look at there's so many different places. Of course, there's gonna be problems. And the horse industry is no different. And we all saw that a few years ago with some of the videos about waterboarding and different things like that that were just ridiculous. Traumatic events that I'm sure did have the effect of learned helplessness and other traumatic things. But on a day to day basis, and we're gonna bring this back into the idea of trotting or loping 10 circles, and that is much more towards this idea of where do we define persistent failure and that kind of stuff.

To me, this is where the Foursquare model really shines, because what this brings up is that we've got the riders mind, the riders body, the horses mind and the horses body. And these are all of these are all happening inside of each question. And the two main focuses of this podcast will be the idea of the Foursquare model. And then this bigger concept of just what do you believe about learned helplessness with people? Because as a person, you're going to have a lot of experience between, you know, where you think that line of persistent failure to succeed or stretching your comfort zone is because that's really what we need to talk about. So what we're gonna do is first we're going to briefly discuss just the idea of learned helplessness. Then we're going to bring it into an actual horse example or two. One, I think about learned helplessness with people. And I want to question where my own personal breaking point would be. I start to think, well, learned helplessness if it is just, you know, kind of along the lines of the failure to succeed. But in your question, it was more of a you know, would it get boring? Would it create this sense of of not being exciting enough? Makes me think, what about kids going to school? I've raised three kids. There were definitely questions asked. I remember being a kid and I remember asking the questions, do I really need to go to school? Do you have any idea how boring it is to sit through a 40 minute lecture with this particular teacher? And then for sure, when you got older.

Have you ever sat through a two hour or four hour meeting that you thought was the most boring thing ever? And so a lot of your answers to what you believe about things that humans do, like sitting at desks for a really long time mandatory exercise that can get kind of interesting like I just saw. Thank you. Facebook, a picture of a dog on a treadmill because there was this little tiny dog that was obese, severely obese. So should they be forcing this dog to have physical exercise? Where is the line? Because at the end of the day, you get to choose the line and what you believe. But do know that you need to like your reasons for your choices because they will also impact your results. So let's talk for a minute about the Foursquare model. And the Foursquare model says that we've got the the the rider's mind, which is what we're distinctly discussing here. And then it's going to connect to your body and how you're going to show up with that horse. And then that's going to be reflected in the horses, mind and body. So let's put this into a few examples, OK? First of all, short rant horses are amazing.

I find them absolutely amazing. One of the ways that they're amazing is that they can reflect us so well. Of course, this doesn't mean that if you take a wild Mustang and pull it out and jump in the round pen with it, that it immediately reflects us perfectly. But once the horses have been around us and acclimated and they're kind of they're in our system a little bit, they've let's just say they grew up around humans. They do a really pretty good job of reflecting us. I find it fascinating to study this across the board. And my husband teaches horsemanship at a college, which means he's got a group of horses that stay pretty consistent and a group of students that are always changing. And he comes home and is always telling me that he gets to use this illustration all the time, that when students are like, I just can't do this, this horse just won't do this. He can easily just switch that one horse to five different students and the horse will respond five different ways. And that's what I was talking about in the episode of this podcast, where I call it GRANDMOMS Rules. A long time ago, I noticed that horses are gonna move to whatever is allowed, just like children do. Excellent podcast to go back and listen to. But this is also why it matters so much what we believe when we work with the horse.

Because if we look at the riders mind and the rider chooses to believe that ten laps will cause the horse something negative, then you're going to reflect that in your way of being. And that means that in your body, if you've got that gill or that question or that doubt, then you're going to reflect it in your posture, your tone, the way you hold the rope or any tool that you have in just your whole way of being. This is one of the challenges with learning is because as you're learning, you have to choose your new beliefs as you go. And this is what stretches people and and it causes this strange tension in your body when you're trying to decide, do I believe Stacy when she says I should be a little more. Ten times. And then you've got this conflicting thing in your body. And it's why I can take hold of the horses, lead rope, ask the horse to trot on the lunge line ten times around me. And I don't carry that guilt and I don't carry that posture and the horse doesn't pick up on it. And I'm more likely to have success because of something as simple as that belief, because, by the way, beliefs aren't simple. They're very deep and complex. At times they're simple.

And yet changing them is an interesting process. Now the horse picks up on your mind and your body, and then here's where it gets really interesting. When I take all of that horse in it and it goes around and it trots around there because it picks up my body language, my beliefs, my everything like that. And now it reflects what I'm thinking. And it goes around there. But if I hand it back to you and you're still unsure, or even better yet, if you are trying to get the horse to trot 10 laps and you haven't seen it proved you haven't seen me do it with your horse, then it's even more likely that whatever you're thinking is going to be reflected. And then it's going to confirm your idea that you weren't quite sure whether ten laps was a good idea. So this is why having this square model and being able to really break down all four is super important. Jessie and I'm a husband. We have fun when we switch. You know, it's fun as an instructor. If you can change, if I take hold of your horse and I go work the horse or he switches students around because it becomes much more Illustrated to the people standing in the arena. How quickly the horses will reflect and change. Now this works both positively and negatively. I could maybe argue that this goes bad even faster, meaning it heads towards a negative even faster.

So if you don't believe it's possible very quickly it becomes not possible. But it also works in a positive way. It works in the positive way. And maybe what makes that a little less clear is that as we move up through so something as simple as, you know, getting the horse to pick up on my energy and stay out of my space like I have a presence and I'm like, stay out of my space. And somebody who's not quite as confident and that the horse will come right in, that we can make a switch really quick where people have a little more trouble in in believing that they're affecting it this much is because there are places where you still have to do a lot of physical work, because that's where the body, the rider's body in the horse's body come in. So, for example, doing lead changes or let's just use dressage for a minute. I'm going to talk about Willo here when I can believe it. But if I don't go out there and physically practice it, I'm not going to have the muscle memory. I'm not going to have the strength. I'm not going to have the practice. So but belief, you've got to remember, the belief is the first piece of this. So let's just pause for a second and look at Willo.

If you've been following along online with my YouTube video series, The Trail to the World Show, you'll know that Willo is on that trail. But if you haven't been watching, let me do a little recap. So short recap. Willow's eight years old and my husband, I bred and raised her. She was sold and then I bought her back as a four year old on started. She was tiny. And you'll see she's still pretty small. She's under fourteen hands. I started her under saddle when she was a 4 year old and she was tiny, didn't do that much, just kind of rode around. She's naturally timid. She's naturally insecure. And I know this about her, but I choose to believe that she's capable of more than what are natural reactions are. So I expect more. And so for three years, she basically learned to ride around, steer left, right, go on trail rides. And of course, I started doing a little bit more because I train. So I put sliders on her and started working on her slides and got her to where she could slide 10, 15 feet. She can spin like an average speed. Change leads net grain, direct rain, because that's what I obviously start with as direct raining if you've been watching the stuff. Lots of trail ride. Doing lots of just playing around, messing around. I even let friends go out on trail rides on her because she's just kind of broken enough.

So just go down the trail and. Yeah. And then this year in February, I decided that I wanted to do some traditional dressage and I had my choice between popcorn, Gabby and Willow. And I decided that Willow was my best bet because she was in shape. She's younger. She's been sound. There's all these different issues. She's not as young as Gabby, who's only four. She's not as old as Popcorn, who's 16, who's been having some soundest things. And I thought she's my best bet. And here's an interesting fact. I signed up for my first traditional dressage show in February, and Willow had never had the saddle on. Never once had she'd put my dressage out along. But I did know some of these things I trusted in Episode 5, the idea that there are stages of competency. And I was probably unconsciously incompetent, but I would quickly become consciously incompetent. Somewhere along this line and hopefully I would move up to consciously competent somewhere. I'm not even reaching for unconsciously competent for dressage right now. I also trusted an Episode 10 that making mistakes in the right direction. It was not going to be pretty, but we were going to be above the safety line and I was going to make mistakes, but I was going to learn from them. And I believed in episode 14 that there was gonna be a lot of muscle memory that goes into this.

A lot of habit building on my side. I also believed in Episode 31, the idea that my on training a horse, am I adding layers? What am I doing here? I believe I'm adding layers. So I believed in that. And I believed in episode 22 a lot that I can think that those horses are capable of way more. They can move beyond Predator versus pray, pray versus Predator. I truly believe most people are vastly underestimating their horses. And so Willow and I just earned our bronze medal in dressage and since the beginning of the year. I didn't know what that meant. I'm going to go ahead and tell you what it means is that the dressage world has. You can earn a bronze, a silver or gold as you move up through the levels. And the bronze is the first of these three medals that signifies your competency level in dressage. So to do that, Willo and I had to earn above 60 percent in to first level test to second level tests and to third level tests. And it was not easy and it was not mistake free. I haven't even come close to having one test that was not mistake free. And the interesting thing, though, is that neither of us had ever ridden any of these tests in February.

She'd never had the saddle on. I had never shown in it. And we completed all of these levels in three months instead of the years it normally takes. And I say this because I really want to illustrate this. We didn't listen. I didn't listen to people who would have said it's not possible. It's not realistic. I listened to my horse and she was capable and willing and not perfect. But we had laid enough of a foundation that we kind of cruised our way up through there, not because it was easy, but I believed in it first. And then I was willing to go out there and make mistakes and try. And the coolest thing is that Willow is still at her core. She's still naturally more insecure, but her confidence has grown. And you can see videos on YouTube. I can switch back and forth between bareback riding on the trail to Western saddles and playing around and ranch to my dressage saddle and showing because I believe she's capable. And therefore, I know that I can put in the work and I can get the evidence to happen what you believe will become evident as you play it out with your actions, because if you believe it can happen. I'm a firm believer that if you believe in it, you can make it happen. You might have to keep floundering around for quite a while to figure it out.

But I truly believe that. And so I love, love, love that you, Mark, and your instructor are thinking and that you're this mindful of your horses. What I would really encourage you to do is believe figure out what you believe about learned helplessness with humans and then consider applying a similar version of it to your horses. Once I decide what I believe, like, I believe that getting up in the morning and exercising is simultaneously not the first choice I would make. And yet I believe it has amazing results. So I do it. So I put myself through that. I'm also then willing to put my horses through work. I believe it's healthy for them to work. I believe that Willow is developing into a stronger, better version of herself because of everything I'm doing, but because I believe it. I can then create it. Once you decide what you believe. Make sure you like the. And do you have for believing it and then live knowing that the results of what you believe will become evident, as you put it, into action? Next week, I'm going to move in to season for the horses body, and I'm super excited that I'll be announcing my first podcast sponsor. And the great thing about sponsors is that they help ensure the future creation and ongoing creation of this podcast. Thank you guys so much for listening. And I'll talk to you again in the next episode.

If you enjoy listening to Stacie's podcast, please visit Stacy Westfall dot com for articles, videos and tips to help you and your horse succeed.

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